Stupefying and very, very dangerous; the Merkel government will collapse soon enough, but it will already be too late.
The road to the reception camp in Hesepe has become something of a refugees’ avenue. Small groups of young men wander along the sidewalk. A family from Syria schleps a clutch of shopping bags towards the gate. A Sudanese man snakes along the road on his bicycle. Most people don’t speak a word of German, just a little fragmentary English, but when they see locals, they offer a friendly wave and call out, “Hello!”
The main road “is like a pedestrian shopping zone,” says one resident, “except without the stores.” Red-brick houses with pretty gardens line both sides of the street, and Kathrin and Ralf Meyer are standing outside theirs. “It’s gotten a bit too much for us,” says the 31-year-old mother of three. “Too much noise, too many refugees, too much garbage.”
Now the Meyers are planning to move out in November. They’re sick of seeing asylum-seekers sit on their garden wall or rummage through their garbage cans for anything they can use. Though “you do feel sorry for them,” says Ralf, who’s handed out some clothes that his children have grown out of. “But there are just too many of them here now.”
The tidy central Europeans get the full force of middle-eastern sanitary habits and they’re amazed to discover that all the multi-kulti propaganda they’ve absorped over the past thirty years is complete bunkum.
Six weeks after Chancellor Angela Merkel’s historic decision to open Germany’s borders, there is a shortage of basic supplies in many places in this prosperous nation. Cots, portable housing containers and chemical toilets are largely sold out. There is a shortage of German teachers, social workers and administrative judges. Authorities in many towns are worried about the approaching winter, because thousands of asylum-seekers are still sleeping in tents.
But what Germany lacks more than anything is a plan to make Merkel’s two most-pronounced statements on the crisis — “We can do it” and “We cannot close our borders” — fit together. In the second month of what has been dubbed the country’s brand new “Welcoming Culture,” it has become clear to many that Germany will only be able to cope if the number of refugees drops.But that is unlikely to happen anytime soon.
So say good-bye to Mama Merkel fairly soon:
The griping over Merkel’s policies has grown louder within her own party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). The meetings of the party’s parliamentary group, which for many years radiated the boredom of an English gentleman’s club, now resemble tribunals against the chancellor. Meanwhile, Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, the strong man in Merkel’s cabinet, also expressed his own dissatisfaction, in distant Peru, by cracking jokes about border controls in the former East Germany.
Merkel is looking increasingly isolated. Government sources say she has made refugee policy her personal concern, and now she is being left to deal with it on her own. Last week, Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière confided in his Luxembourg counterpart, telling him that Merkel did not have a plan, only “cold feet.”
Clemens Binninger, a member of parliament from the state of Baden-Württemberg, said: “If you are of the opinion that we can’t control and reject, then I am of a different opinion.” Hans-Peter Uhl, a conservative from Bavaria, predicted the end of Merkel’s political career if she doesn’t change her approach: “When the people realize that the government cannot or will not protect them, then the people will elect a different government.”
As opposed to electing a different people, which seems to be Merkel’s Brechtian solution to Germany’s catastrophic demographics. Read the whole piece, published in Der Spiegel, to get a sense of how thoroughly bollixed up this is. The only question is whether Frau Merkel goes before the rioting breaks out or after.
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